


Shit Happens

by Forth



Category: Alien Series
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28239210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Forth/pseuds/Forth
Summary: Short story in the Alien universe. Posted because I had no idea what else to do with it.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Shit Happens

You probably think you know about the Xenomorphs. We’ve chased them back across a dozen systems now with the kind of dumb exuberance a pomeranian shows when terrorising a bear cub, never thinking that mama might be nearby. The biggest, scariest thing we’ve seen so far is their queens, but even they clearly aren’t the ones who built the half-mechanical, half-biological technology that we’ve found and which clearly worked and did something once, but from which we can’t tease even the slightest inkling of function. What we’ve found is guard dogs gone feral. Pray we never find their home world. But that’s a horror story for someone else to live through, likely very briefly. 

Everyone talks about their blood. That terrifying substance that everyone thinks is an acid but which is one of the most vicious flourinating compounds we’ve ever found, with a catalysation path that we still haven’t fully untangled, mostly because we still don’t know how to store the stuff, so all the research work is conducted gingerly on degraded samples in situ. And yeah, it’s nasty. Do not lick it. But feral guard dogs leave other things behind and they’re not at all fastidious about it. 

I don’t know what they eat when we don’t serve them nice warm infantry but whatever it is goes right through them like their blood goes through an aramid breastplate. We found it pretty quickly and worked out more or less immediately that it was not safe to handle so we decontaminated hard every time we came back through the lock. It wasn’t until we hit Beta Hydri 3 that we encountered the stuff in anything other than completely sealed enviro suits. BH3 is a superearth. Hotter and bigger than earth, it grinds your joints and makes your life a sweaty misery, but the density and pressure are only the equivalent of a few hundred metres below datum on earth and the O2 is a very accommodating 29%. You can survive naked there, at least in theory. Not that I know anyone who tried.

So we went out with biofilter half-face masks to keep random stuff out of our lungs and regular combat gear plus a pinch of fairy dust to protect the rest of us. We only found a small installation and figured it was a quick and fairly easy cleanout operation. Our M577 was dropped on an open plain about 12 clicks west of the main opening. Their entrances are all the same. Broad to the point of being slightly ridiculous but easy to drive on, even ruined. The easy drive in ended when the ramp gave way under us and the transport dropped 20 metres onto its back. That’s even less fun than it sounds, being in more than 1.4 earth normal gravity. The body of the transport broke open, killing all but four of us and leaving two of the survivors injured badly. Welcome to Beta Hydri Three. I left the Lance Corp to deal with the other two and tried getting the comms working, but it turns out that when you bury all of your external aerials under the rest of your vehicle on a planet with a deep atmosphere and a magnetic field that makes your hair point north, you can’t phone home. That’s ok - they already know we’ve gone silent, and it won’t take long for them to get down here. Stay put, Anna. Set your perimeter and sit tight.

So I went to set the perimeter. Semi-autonomous swarm bots and a few broad spectrum sensor stakes is all we need. Slow. Steady. Whoops.

The stench really ought to have warned me that it wasn’t just mud. That and the fact that the humidity wasn’t exactly high. My heel went out from under me and I tobogganed down the collapsed ramp, dropped another five meters and broke a leg, both collarbones and at least one rib. Stupendous.

The morass I landed in initially felt like mud. I know mud. My relationship with it drove my mother to despair and killed her dreams of ever making a nice young lady out of me, long after everyone else knew that this was something that was never going to happen. But this wasn’t mud. It seeped through cracks and fibres with a facility that belied its viscosity. The coolness when it touched my skin came with a hard clanging burn.

There is a point with pain where you don’t scream anymore. I made a brief sound that I utterly failed to recognise as myself before lapsing into a blank, hissing rictus. It’s not just intensity of pain. Some kinds of pain have a special flavour that makes them especially memorable. The jagged, dragging slice of a paper cut. The enveloping throb of a mashed finger. This is the spice of pain that gives it character. I felt the pores of my skin open, nerve endings teased out with the smell of acetone and mustard and somehow spread wide. I lost track of time then, until the sun rose in the sky to the point where it shone into the pit where I lay, looking disconcertingly like our own sun, only hotter. The moisture in alien shit, whatever it is, is volatile. It crusted, cracked, became inert. Finally the pain eased enough for me to scream and sob and then to draw wracked shuddering breaths and squint into the sky. Nobody was coming that I could see. Not that I would see them until they were less than a minute away. The sun rose higher. I started to sweat.

Terrestrial sweat met crusted alien shit. Enzymes shook hands, tore into molecules, and made something new. 

I wanted the pain back. I’d take that over this maddening itching that penetrated my muscles and created skittering scraping sensations along my bones. My skin seemed to lift some inches from my body while somehow the straps of my armour seemed to tighten, digging into my flesh. The rest of the day took forever and a moment, the sun dragging across the sky until my exhausted body gave up. I smelt gangrene and lavender, pine sap and cat’s piss and I passed out. 

We all dream. We know dreams. Even though we almost never know them at the time, the weird internal logic and shifting needs are something we all recognise afterwards. But at the time, it’s just how the universe works. So I knew that all I had to do was bring the otherfood to the brood and all would be well. So I picked up the…

I picked up my…

I stood.

We had been there before, in scarlet and olive threads that hung on the air. Each of us holding the hoard of before, the store that dwindled, but slow. Slow! Wait. Those that hold the light and the will are coming back. We will be faithful. We will gather the pieces of strange flesh and keep them. We will use the strange flesh and multiply. We will drive the strange flesh from our halls. We are faithful.

Tall and bright, the lightbearers are. Stone and flesh. Wonderful. Terrible. Folding themselves into the bones of the worlds and devouring stars to light their way in their escape from entropy. 

These are not words. They hold more than that. A tangled, ordered whole that hangs neatly from every knotted corner. We are.

We were...

We are…

I am...carried. Words drag and we are still. Light that is not the light flares and the net looses but we are still…

I am still...us.

I am with yes I am with you. I, we our leg, my leg oh god it hurts.

We are. We are not now but we are and I carry that in the smell of flowers, sap, piss and decay. I have learned to keep that from those of my flesh. Of the otherflesh. They would find the bones of the kin, folded into stone, memories kept against a new birth. So I don’t tell them. It’s just shit. Don’t get it on you. And watch where you tread.


End file.
